To be successful, your blog content has to meet a need for its audience, whether that’s being entertaining, funny, useful or interesting. Even though it can seem like it’s easier for consumer brands with fun products to create successful blogs, that’s just not the case. In fact, blogs provide businesses – even in dry subject areas – with an opportunity to be both useful and informative while demonstrating expertise.

Here are three ways to elevate your blog from boring to brilliant.

1) Answer frequently asked questions

Now that people are using search engines to ask more complex questions, there’s an opportunity for businesses to utilise their expertise to answer tricky questions in a clear and engaging way.

Example: Useful content from Crunch accountants

Accounting could feasibly be considered one of the most ‘boring’ subjects, yet online accountants Crunch are using their blog to provide useful content for freelancers and small businesses. The posts answer common accounting questions like how to work out mileage allowance and calculate holiday pay in a way that’s easy to understand.

2) Be relevant to your audience

It’s not boring if it’s relevant – look for opportunities to make your blog closely match the needs of your audience.

Example: Informative content from eSpares

On the face of it, a blog about spare parts for appliances may not sound thrilling, however it’s all about the context. While normally I wouldn’t be rushing to read a blog about dishwashers, a change in circumstance meant I became an eSpares reader.

Last week, my dishwasher broke, and suddenly, the kind of content that eSpares publish, like ‘Five dishwasher problems and how to fix them’ was like gold dust to me. At this time, their blogs exactly matched the information I was looking for. In addition, if this content could help me diagnose the issues with my dishwater I am subsequently likely to be very grateful to eSpares (perhaps even to the extent of giving them a plug on this blog …), and will purchase spare parts from them when they are required.

3) Think creatively

There are some topics where it’s genuinely quite difficult to create on-going content without going outside of the core subject. In these instances you need to think creatively about how you could create content that remains relevant while exploring topics outside of the core activity of the business.

Example: Valuable resources from Simply Business

Simply Business realised that just creating content around business insurance was going to be fairly restrictive. So, in addition to insurance and business related blogs, they have created a blog which is full of useful content for their target audience, small businesses and landlords. They’ve done this by curating high quality content to create valuable resources for their target audience.